Masonry Magazine October 1992 Page. 19
Milwaukee Journal Photo by Dale Guidan
RON SZEWCZYK, owner of Wood Level Repair, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, looks for leaks of light beneath a level that would indicate a need for further smoothing.
Tried and True Levels
Help in Solid Buidling
New materials open new vistas for a fine, old art.
INCHES FROM RON Szewcsyk's eye, a bubble slips through greenish alcohol inside a glass tube, heedless of thin lines painted to frame it, until it settles when the earth commands.
The wood leveling tool holding the tube, shaved smooth along its edges and clapped to a test block of unvarying granite, shows a near-perfect reading: Not a shimmer of the fluorescent light behind it shows through. The bubble, heeding gravity, also finds the perfect balance between the lines.
Szewczyk says he wishes that his life were that certain. Society and nature rarely match, he says. But he has found a consolation in repairing levels.
Level is a description: perfectly flat and even. It also is a tool to tell whether a wall or surface is straight, made by beings whose lives, thoughts and emotions rarely match its precision.
The resting place of the bubble inside its tube, or vial, can fix whether floors and desks sit steady, whether walls and skyscrapers stand plumb and strong, whether bowling alleys lie fair and flat, and field guns fire accurately and cranes hold steady.
In some levels, Ron Szewczyk says, the bubble settles too easily. So, he says, do some people who use them and maybe, some who make them.
Szewczyk (pronounced chef-
By TIM NORRIS
Staff Writer, The Milwaukee Journal
check), 58, mostly handles older, battered, broken levels nowadays, brought in by masons, carpenters, plumbers and other tradespeople. His stock is often exotic: mahogany from Honduras and brass from Europe and bubbles (as he says) from outer space, perfect nodules of airless vacuum. But his repair operation, Wood Level Repair Company, is decidedly humble: a dim and dingy place on Milwaukee's near south side.
The first time Szewczyk saw the inside of that space, he says, he had just pitched a tiny metal washer through the window glass. It was a blacksmith shop then, just before World War II, and Szewczyk, still a boy, meant to tease the horses inside. Instead, he teased the smith.
Szewczyk grew up just a few hundred feet down a (mostly) flat line of sidewalk, at South 5th and West Mineral Sts., in another building that still stands. He can remember crowds on the sidewalks and men balancing buckets of beer, three to a side, on sticks across their shoulders.
His father, Tom, sold used furniture on the floor below and fixed windows as a sideline. The blacksmith grabbed young Szewczyk by the boy's right ear and hauled him to his father, who would fix the blacksmith's window and do his best ti fix his son's view through it. But children grow their own way, and Ron's way was mischief.
More than once, Szewczyk says, his life needed leveling. School-rooms confined him, and offices and machine shops did, too. He once held jobs in two local foundries in one day and quit them both before midnight. He tried remodeling houses and building porches and grooming city parks.
Only as his athlete's body began to sag and his bad habits became afflictions did he start to find a future.
After searching for half a lifetime, Szewczyk bought Matt Pugel's company, Universal Level, seventeen years ago, where Pugel had designed and made wood levels by hand.
At one point two dozen women bent over tables in Pugel's work space, assembling levels from three-quarters of an inch to twelve feet long. Pugel, in turn, once ran another level making operation for Don Wright, then president of the Empire Level Company, a multimillion dollar success story based in Wauwatosa.
Wright's son Randall, runs Empire now, on wooded family land just southwest of Highway 100 and Blue Mound Road, and his level-makers are largely plastic extruding and molding machines and mechanical
MASONRY-SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1992 19